Hard Kisses, Bitter Tears follows a ten-year span in the life of an eighteen-year-old Belarussian youth from 1935 through 1945. Though it is essentially a saga of Larion Daneelivich Sulupin’s personal life, it is set against the tumultuous internal events of Stalin’s pre-World War II Soviet Russia and Larion’s journey through the subsequent world war. Larion’s discovery of love at first sight is interrupted and then threatened by the outbreak of war. Will Larion ever reunite with his young wife, Tamara, and family? Will they be able to survive the war? With the end of war looming, it is not certain whether the Red Army or Patton’s Third Army will be the family’s liberators, but the end of the war brings new threats and challenges to the lives of Larion, his wife and their young son.