I've finished Tchaikovsky's Children of Strife.  I thought it was very good, and a worthy addition to that universe.

I'm finding it hard to describe without dropping spoilers, but it does a good job of giving us some of the earlier history of the Earth that led to Kern's nanovirus uplift programme and the ark ships that followed.  It gives us the Portiid spiders and their Human partners, a version of Kern herself, an instance of the entity from Nod, and a simulation survivor from Imir, as shown in the previous books.  New characters include a group of the original Kern's competitors who escape from Earth on their own, their subsequent interaction with an ark ship and what they end up doing on and to another terraformed planet, as well as an example of another species uplifted alongside the Portiids on Kern's World.

Recommended to those who enjoyed the earlier books in the series.  It might also work as an entry point for those who haven't read the predecessor volumes.

I'm stepping away from SF/F for the next little while.  I am currently reading a literary(?) political thriller first novel and will be following that with some new tartan noir before heading back to the SF ghetto via a century old example of Russian SF.  That should be interesting.