His debut book was Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (1987), a collection of short stories.

To Siberia (1996), set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998 and nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize.

I kjølvannet, translated as In the Wake (2002), is a young man's story of losing his family in the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990 (Petterson himself lost his mother, father, younger brother and a niece in the disaster); it won the Brage Prize for 2000.

His 2008 novel Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I Curse the River of Time) won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2009, with an English translation published in 2010.

The 2005 English language translation, Out Stealing Horses, was awarded the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2007 International Dublin Literary Award (the world's largest monetary literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English, €100,000).