I personally love Alejo Carpentier's historical novels. The Kingdom of this Earth, about the Haitian Revolution, is still widely considered one of the best works of literature of the 20th century. I personally feel that the better work is his novel Explosion in the Cathedral, which both looks at how the French Revolution impacted people living in the late 18th century Caribbean and (more generally) how people change during revolutions, turning from idealistic radicals to hardened pragmatists who do what they must in order to survive the constantly changing governments in the capitol.

I would also highly recommend Mario Vargas Llosas' The War of the End of the World, which deals with the Canudos rebellion in late 19th century Brazil and (on a theoretical level) the problems with eye witness accounts and how people will often see the same thing but interpret what they wanted to interpret. His more recent work, The Dream of the Celt, about the Irish born British official, activist, and later subversive Irish revolutionary, Roger Casement, is also a very interesting book (though his best will always be War of the End of the World).

But, in the end, I think /u/jevoislavieenrose/ has the right idea. Novels by contemporaries are often the very best way to go. In fact, a passing reference in a novel is what answered one of the minor conundrums of my undergraduate thesis.

Engels once wrote in a famous 1888 letter that he learned more from Balzac's fiction about contemporary French society than "I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together."

I would recommend contemporary novels from the time you're interested in if you're concerned about historical accuracy. Let me be the first to suggest Jane Eyre, Don Quixote, Les Miserables or Oliver Twist.

If its on the fictional that stay as close to historical facts as possible I like Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Umberto Ecco's The Name of the Rose, and maybe The Pillars of the Earth of Ken Follet (but be wary of some minor inconsistencies between reality and the book). And as /u/ThucydidesWasAwesome and /u/jevoislavieenrose/ said, any novel that it's contemporary to the time you're interested will give you a general idea, at least from one point of view, of the era.

The seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian are quite good, although they reflect a bit of the historiography of the 1970s and 80s, when they were first published. (He wrote at least a couple of non-naval novels, as well as biographies of Picasso and Joseph Banks.)

I also quite enjoy Mary Renault's historical fiction, but I do not have any expertise regarding its authenticity.