Her first novel, Bonheur d'occasion (1945),[5] gave a starkly realistic portrait of the lives of people in Saint-Henri, a working-class neighbourhood of Montreal.

[6] Published in English as The Tin Flute (1947),[7] the book won the 1947 Governor General's Award for fiction as well as the Royal Society of Canada's Lorne Pierce Medal.

[6] Distributed in the United States, where it sold more than three-quarters of a million copies, the Literary Guild of America made The Tin Flute a feature book of the month in 1947.

[11] Where Nests the Water Hen, Gabrielle Roy's second novel, is a sensitive and sympathetic tale that captures both the innocence and the vitality of a sparsely populated frontier.

Alexandre Chenevert (1954), is a dark and emotional story that is ranked as one of the most significant works of psychological realism in the history of Canadian literature.

[13] Patricia Claxton won her second Governor General's Award in 1999 for translating François Ricard's biography of Gabrielle Roy.

The National Library of Canada (now Library and Archives Canada) has preserved a collection of her materials covering the years 1940 to 1983, including manuscripts, typescripts, galleys of published and unpublished works such as La Rivière sans repos, Cet été qui chantait, Un jardin au bout du monde, Ces enfants de ma vie, and La Détresse et l'enchantement, as well as business and personal correspondence, business records, and memorabilia.