“Man kann nur entdecken, was man sich vorstellen kann” (One can only discover what one can imagine), pronounces a character in Gabrielle Alioth's Die Erfindung von Liebe und Tod (The Invention of Love and Death, 2003). Is discovery, then, manipulated by imagination? Or does one rather discover that which independently exists in space, “an immutable given,” as the geographer Patricia Price-Chalita calls it in her seminal paper “Spatial Metaphor and the Politics of Empowerment: Mapping a Place for Feminism and Postmodernism in Geography”? Price-Chalita ends her article with the insight that “spatial metaphor is overwhelmingly central for a wide range of feminist scholars attempting to forge new identity, politics, and theory.” The following pages will demonstrate how the narrator-protagonist in Alioth's novel makes use not of spatial metaphor but instead constructs literal (yet fictional) New World space in order to find a home when, because of her history, no other place of respite is possible. With its focus on the settlement of seventeenth-century Newfoundland, Die Erfindung explores the element of imaginative projection in conjunction with discovery; it challenges readers to consider the blurring boundary between reality and fiction, between discovery and invention, and—by way of multiple refractions—it portrays the unstable construction of space.