This article proposes a fresh look at the study of narrative dynamics from a reader-oriented point of view. Narratology has focused much on the arrangement of structural units of narrative, i.e. episodes, and emotions such as curiosity, suspense and surprise emerging from the tensions between the underlying connectedness of the episodes and their presentation in the text. While cognitive approaches have provided insight into the mental operations by which readers construct a text’s meaning, it is not clear how coherence and meaning is created across episodes in longer narratives, and how the broader range of emotions is involved. Integrating work on the role of emotions in episode structuring with a theory of the mental integration of narrative spaces, I suggest that the emotional relevance of episodes triggers the construction of emotion spaces which both possess a temporal structure of their own and contribute a particular – affective – temporality to the dynamic experience of narrative.